Tuesday, June 03, 2014
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As a kid, I thought that \(\pi\approx 3.14159265358979\) is a very important number, so I memorized the first 30 digits when I was 8. Because the amount of "wow" I could see at school was higher than the efforts I had to invest to learn the digits, I learned 100 digits when I was 10 – I can still tell you how it goes – even though I was already recognizing very clearly that there's no point in learning too many digits.

The number\[

\Huge \pi^{\rm TM}\approx 3.14

\] is arguably the most important irrational number in mathematics – possible competitors are \(e\) and \(\sqrt{2}\). It is very natural for a high percentage of geeky mugs and T-shirt to display this Greek lowercase letter.

Off-topic, programming: BTW, with some improved score around 3.67, I returned to top 15 (and top 3%) of the Higgs machine learning contest LOL.

The news about the bizarre legal decision were kickstarted by Wired yesterday; see GoogleNews for others. The Wired article reminds us that this may be the most important legal verdict related to \(\pi\)® since 1897 when Indiana tried to enforce the value \(\pi=3.2\) on its citizens.

A difference between a rabbit hit by a car and a lawyer hit by a car is that you may see some traces of the tires in front of the rabbit from the braking. The world of lawyers has its own rules that often work in order to help the society – and the good guys in the society – but some of the decisions are just stunning.

But what's special about a particular street artist relatively to everyone else who is fascinated by \(\pi\)® and wants to share his excitement?

A fine for BNP Paribas is just an insanity

One more news report about the unreasonable decisions by arrogant lawyers and politicians caught my attention today. The eurozone's largest bank, BNP Paribas – of course that even folks like myself have funds of order $10,000+ associated with that bank – is being criminalized in the U.S. because it made business with Iran and covered it which is totally OK in France and Europe but it was not OK in America. The supposed fine is $10 billion – it's like one year of profits of the whole corporation. I can't believe my eyes.

America is important but what do these evil people think about themselves? If they had some respect towards the allies, they would agree that they wouldn't even have a right to criticize a company for doing something that is OK according to the laws where the bank is performing most of the operations. OK, imagine that a concept of a fine is acceptable. But this infinite fine? Do the U.S. officials think that they may impose an unlimited fine on any company in the world just because it ignores what they consider "their rules"? Can other nations do it, too? May the Czech Republic order Exxon to pay $1 trillion? Because its CEO doesn't speak Czech which the CEOs should?

This proposed $10 billion fine is completely disproportional relatively to what BNP Paribas has done. Some U.S. politicians have done much more to allow Iran to do dangerous things than BNP Paribas. If a punishment proportional to this $10 billion fine for BNP Paribas were applied to Barack Obama himself, all blacks and Democrat politicians in the U.S. would have to be executed.

So I would like to remind these arrogant jerks that they are not owning the world. Iran is a potentially dangerous country but if this is the cure, then the cure – these U.S. apparatchiks – is worse than the disease.

Blondes' DNA, completely off-topic: I was intrigued by the announcements that the gene of the blondes has been identified. The researchers were inspired by fish, successfully produced blonde mice, and then they succeeded with some human cell cultures, too.

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Maverick
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A solution might be to crowd source a million or so everyday people printing tshirts, business cards and putting up websites using the pi symbol - imagine the cost of the cease and desist orders, the take down orders etc

I think the real culprits are the lawmakers (politicians) who make all kinds of crazy patents possible. Then judges and patent lawyers are another morally completely corrupt category of culprits. Crooks and swindlers (extremely greedy sociopaths) are by just people who by definition do harm most directly to others. The politicians/lawmakers, judges and prosecuting lawyers are providing the tools and directly assist the patent law exploiting crooks.

Apparently a trademark on pi followed by a dot, where the owner claims products with just pi look similar enough to be in violation. No indication this would hold up in court, but Zazzle has just taken them all down because they don't care enough to fight it.

Are you still coming up with improvements of the algorithm or are you just tweaking parameters by now?

A part of the algorithm is changing qualitatively all the time - although these "not just parameters" changes shouldn't be called quite revolutionary relatively to my first ones. ;-) Adjusting parameters, too.

This is totally crazy. I'd be curious to know how long this ownership go... 1 year? More?... Enough time to launch his brand?... By law there should be some expiry date to this ownership.

I remember reading that the famous chocolate bar Kit-Kat has ownership of the sentence "Have a break... Have Kit-Kat". If another brand wants to use this "Have a break...", they will be sued and surely have a big fine to pay.

And weights of the most common isotopes as well? Or do you just estimate these to within a few percent?

By the way, I'm curious about the way you remember the digits of π. Do you 'see' them or do you 'remember the tune', i.e. the verbal form in an (unspoken) recitation? And can you access them at random, giving the nth digit for example?

You wasted your time, although when I was an engineering students in the 1960's we were expected to memorize the values of the logarithms of the first ten or so digits and the values of the trig functions of the main angles. All forgotten now, and hand-held calculators make the practice pointless anyway.

As to Indiana (I did my graduate studies at Purdue), I believe the value for pi was supposed to be 3, but the proposal never got out of committee. Purdue claims that one of its grads squelched the proposal. It must have been made by a Notre Dame or IU grad.

As to pi = 3, this is not a stupid idea. That's an error less than 5%. 3.2 would be an error of less than 2%, and 22/7 would an error of 0.04%.

Back in the days of slide rules and mechanical adding machines, accepting such errors would be attractive. Most engineering designs are based on data that has errors as large as a factor of 2 or more. Civil engineers routinely double the expected loads, and mechanical engineers use safety factors as high as 40 in critical applications. So what's 5% or 2% between friends.

I haven't followed the bank story, but as a general question, is it not the case that any bank that has a US subsidiary is subject to US regulations, just like the US companies doing business in Europe, for example? Now, if they don't have a US presence, then it would be hard to understand what the point of the fine is.

OK, but the proposed fine is like 10 years of profit of how much BNP's U.S. branch!

The U.S. is almost everywhere in business - everyone has *some* contacts - which surely doesn't mean that every company may become a target of U.S. fines that are comparable to its global profit, does it?

According to the US Trademark Office "The mark consists of the pi mathematical symbol followed by a period." Not the number, not pi by itself, it wouldn't even cover pi at the end of a sentence. Trademark is not copyright. It only covers use for identifying athletic apparel.It is hardly the first, there are over 800 pi trademarks, though most contain other symbols, or use special fonts, or are only a brand of yogurt.

Wrong. Engineering designs are almost always based on calculations made to several significant figures. When dealing with optics or precision mechanisms the dimensions are routinely held (and tested) from 1 to 100 parts per million. Most civil engineering strength of components determinations allow a factor of two (or more) for safety reasons but the calculations and the strength of the materials employed are alway known much more accurately than a factor of two. If a factor of 40 is used the designer simply does not know what the hell he is doing. I have spent a professional lifetime having to deal with such amateurs.

Copyright law is very different from patent law, which requires both novelty and a concept that is not obvious to a person skilled in the art (USC 103). Anything can be copyrighted but a copyright does not bar use by anyone. It only allows the copyright holder the right to legally prevent an infringer from selling a similar item that exhibits the protected copyright and there is no guarantee that the plaintiff will win the infringement case even if he files suit. There is really nothing wrong with this.Re. Iran, I concur but American politics and the demonization of others (including Putin) leads to some cooky actions.

@BobSkyes & Gene Day: Can I intervene? The accuracy you demand depends on the application . For a residential street project a safety margin of a factor of 2 or 3 may be enough. If you are designing a glass cage hanging up 1000 feet about a street level, you better have a safety margin of 50 or so in the load limit!! If you are designing a nanometer system, then of course, the requirements would be much stringer.

I see. So, anything can be trademarked but a copyright requires novelty (something new) and a patent adds the requirement of invention (not obvious to a person skilled in the art). My own experience is only in patents. Patents also expire 20 years after the application is filed.

The picture below is by Boo - my bird and avatar. Drawn by beak in "Yoplait Whip" a trademark for this yogurt product. He does know Pi to be a little bigger than 3. But doesnt know it could infringe Pi yogurt trademark were it used to sell yogurt. But most humans and birds know little or no trademark and intellectual properties law or - judging by some of what I see - math. It is easy to scare them with a letter saying that they can't use this letter. All - not just a pi - is greek to them. BTW Boo would hold the copyright on this "parroticular" image content or he would were he human. I do not think that birds can register trademarks or hold copyrights in their own name :-)

The EU is an economically advanced block of 500 million people, which precludes the US from being any kind of "ruler" over the them. The main surviving ambiguity in the trans-Atlantic relations is due to the continued existence of NATO and the US participation in European security arrangements.

The current state of human society is such that weapons still remain an essential ingredient of freedom, so if Europe wants to be truly free of the US influence, it should arm itself properly and then abolish NATO or at least reassess and renegotiate its role.

I have difficulty grasping the idea that the executive in place actually matters or is anything more than a mouthpiece for various powerful factions, the office having been effectively compromised in '63. But whether that executive is a frivolous frat boy or a supposed constitutional scholar, he should be ignored.

Consequentially, I don't look to Obama for useful or accurate information and don't spend time worrying about analysis of what he says or does. He's an actor, a focal point, but not an authoritative source. If there is a shift in foreign policy going on, it is only in locale and not substance, which is simply the desire to dominate the entire planet, by force if necessary.

UNC offers TIAA-CREF or Fidelity as options for a defined contribution plan to supplement or replace the state pension plan. Those two plans would be fully vested (by Federal Law) and out of control of UNC.